Sq.io: jq for databases and more

by stavepan • 2 years ago

606 129 2 years ago

mlhpdx• 2 years ago

Dang, I wish I had this while I still had SQL databases.

fforflo2• 2 years ago

I love the idea of pushing JQ and other DSLs close to the database. I've written jq extensions for SQLite [0] and Postgres [1], but my approach involves basically embedding=pushing the jq compiler into the db. So you can do `select jq(json, jqprogram)` as an alternative to jsonpath.

Trying to understand: Is the main purpose of this to use jq-syntax for cataloging-like functionality and/or cross-query? I mean it's quite a few lines of code, but you inspect the database catalogs and offer a layer on top of that? I mean, how much data is actually leaving the database?

[0] https://github.com/Florents-Tselai/liteJQ [1] https://github.com/Florents-Tselai/pgJQ

candiddevmike• 2 years ago

This is neat but I'm not really seeing anything I can't do with standard SQL and CLI tools like psql. Seems like you'd learn more reusable things using standard SQL too.

varenc2• 2 years ago

I find sq handy when you use it to accomplish things you can't (easily) do with just raw SQL. Things like: exporting certain rows to JSON or CSV, transforming rows into nicely formatted log lines for viewing, or reading in a CSV file and querying it the same way you'd query other databases. It's particularly easy to start using if you're already familiar with the jq.

If you use things like `array_to_json(array_agg(row_to_json(....)))` in your psql commands to output some rows to JSON, then sq's `--json` or `--jsonl` is quite a bit easier IMHO. If you know the exact SQL query you want to run you can just do `sq sql '....'` as well, but I agree there's not much point in doing that if you aren't taking advantage of some other sq feature.

maxfurman• 2 years ago

You may know this already, but the SQLite CLI can actually read and query data directly from a csv file, with the right flags

aurareturn• 2 years ago

I agree with @candiddevmike. Might I add that you can do those things fairly easily now with ChatGPT/Claude. I doubt LLMs know how to use Sq.io that much.

neilotoole9• 2 years ago

I'm not really seeing anything I can't do with standard SQL and CLI tools like psql.

Developer here. There's a few features other than the query stuff that I still think are pretty handy.

The "sq inspect" stuff isn't easy to do with the standard CLI tools, or at least wasn't when I started working on sq back in 2013 or so.

https://sq.io/docs/inspect

I also regularly make use of the ability to diff the metadata/schema of different DB instances (e.g. "sq diff @pg_prod @pg_qa").

https://sq.io/docs/diff

renewiltord• 2 years ago

Related is Google’s pipe syntax for SQL https://research.google/pubs/sql-has-problems-we-can-fix-the...

robertclaus• 2 years ago

More tools are always great! Even if it doesn't become the mainstream, it's always great to see people explore new ways of dealing with databases!

prepend• 2 years ago

More good tools are always great. But I don’t think random clutter is always good.

Fortunately we don’t have to see it so it’s not like it blocks my vision.

But I just wanted to note that the idea of “anything is good” is not really true and I don’t like its spread as there’s opportunity cost. I think we need to spend more attention on evaluation and quality and making good things than the idea that even creating lots of bad things is good in some way.

varenc2• 2 years ago

I love sq. It's handy for quickly performing simple operations on DBs and outputting that as CSV or JSON. Though my one wish is that the sq query language (SLQ) supported substring matching like SQL's `... LIKE "SOME_STRING%"`. Though you can just invoke SQL manually with `sq sql`

neilotoole9• 2 years ago

Developer here. Thanks for the kind words.

Substring matching is on my short list (also totally open to a PR!).

tgmatt• 2 years ago

Sorry but I am pronouncing that as 'ess-cue` and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

Looks kinda neat for when I don't want or need anything more than bash for a script.

doctorpangloss• 2 years ago

At some point, why not package Python into a single executable, and symbolic link applications and modules into it for Unixy-ness?

Another POV is all the developers I know who thrive the most and have found the most success: they rate aesthetic concerns the lowest when looking at their tools. That is to say that the packaging or aesthetic coherence in some broader philosophy matters less than other factors.

sweeter• 2 years ago

Its written in Go...

rout39574• 2 years ago

I love JQ. But ... I'd never considered its query language to be particularly admirable. If I want to ask questions of some databases, I don't understand why I'd choose JQ's XPATH-like language to do it.

AlphaSite• 2 years ago

I think for certain types of data manipulation and querying it’s notable more succinct, sql with CTEs is a little better but still far more verbose than data piping.

larodi• 2 years ago

A reply by s.o. who sides with your (potentially unpopular) opinion. With all due respect to DSL languages, IMHO only few people can get on this APL-level of abstraction and cryptic choice for APIs..., and would have the nerves to write it.

From learning perspective JQ seems much more difficult than RegEX for example, its learning curve is potentially steeper than that of CSS and XPATH, which are other examples for querying tree-like-structs. While LLMs are welcome to write it (the jq) for me, my work has relatively little JSON transformations, and for the most part handling these in python/js/perl is okay as.

Stating all this with much fascination for the JQ language itself, as technology, but not as a tool that I find the need for on a daily basis. Besides for me it is much more easier to feed and transform data into Postgres (or even SQLite, which can also be challenging), rather than crunch it w/pandas or R where you can also find fourth generation language capabilities, but performance lags.

VMG3• 2 years ago

What I love about `jq` that I can edit my query (or "program") by appending tokens at the end. Similar to unix pipes. With plain SQL that is not easy.

pkkm• 2 years ago

Sounds like PRQL [1].

[1] https://prql-lang.org/

egeozcan• 2 years ago

Any language with map/reduce/flatten can more or less do that, no? I agree with your point about SQL though. I find it personally horrible for data-shaping tasks and tend to load everything in memory (as long as feasible).

pletnes• 2 years ago

KQL has some good things, pipes is one of them I think.

fer• 2 years ago

Same, if anything I'd look for a SQL-like language for JSON.

hnbad• 2 years ago

Presumably the target audience is people who already frequently use JQ and don't want to juggle different query languages when dealing with different data sources?

neilotoole9• 2 years ago

Developer here.

That was exactly the target audience.

Note that sq doesn't just handle relational DBs, it also has (varying quality) support for CSV, JSON, Excel, and so on. At the time (2013) I wasn't aware of a convenient one-liner mechanism for munging all of those together from the command line.

lucideer• 2 years ago

This!

JQ is great because JSON didn't have a query language & needed one. JQ isn't the best query language - it's just the one that won adoption.

DBs already have query languages that are mostly superior to JQ's.

baq• 2 years ago

honestly I'd rather have sql for json than jq for a database... guess this is exactly what clickhouse-local does

hvenev• 2 years ago

The demo appears too stateful for me. The real power of `jq` is its reliability and the ability to reason about its behavior, which stateful tools inherently lack.

cassepipe• 2 years ago

Not to be confused with the gpg alternative from sequoia-pgp also called sq : https://sequoia-pgp.org/

neilotoole9• 2 years ago

That's an unfortunate naming clash. This "sq" (sq.io) predates the sequoia "sq" by several years I believe.

wreq2luz• 2 years ago

I was reading about something like json output coming to Postgres one day (https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/ZYBdnGW0gKxXL5I_@...). Also the `.wrangle | .data` wraps on an iPhone 13 mini.

jasongill2• 2 years ago

This is interesting. I wonder if there is anything that does the opposite - takes JSON input and allows you to query it with SQL syntax (which would be more appealing to an old-timer like me)

minikomi• 2 years ago

duckdb!

https://duckdb.org/docs/extensions/json.html

danielhep• 2 years ago

I'm using DuckDB to parse GTFS data, which comes in a CSV format. It works wonderfully.

kwailo• 2 years ago

clickhouse-local is incredible, and, in addition to JSON, support TSV, CSV, Parquet and many other input formats. See https://clickhouse.com/blog/extracting-converting-querying-l...

ramraj07• 2 years ago

Why is this better than DuckDB?

nbk_2000• 2 years ago

Octosql does this as well as a few other formats. I've found it useful several times.

https://github.com/cube2222/octosql

zie2• 2 years ago

In PostgreSQL, you can just select against JSON and query away to your hearts content. They have JSON data types and functions to work on it.

masklinn• 2 years ago

That’s pretty much just jq though, you have bespoke json querying capabilities in sql but you’re not sql-querying your json.

At least not before postgres 17, in the latter json_table does provide this capability.

ikari_pl• 2 years ago

Postgres:) load It into a jsonb column and the possibilities are endless, including indexing

fmajid• 2 years ago

https://github.com/postgrespro/jsquery

eproxus• 2 years ago

This tool can do that:

    $ cat example.json | sq sql 'SELECT * FROM data'
    actor_id  first_name  last_name  last_update
    1         PENELOPE    GUINESS    2020-06-11T02:50:54Z
    2         NICK        WAHLBERG   2020-06-11T02:50:54Z

One of the data source types is 'json' and the command 'sq sql ...' lets you execute SQL directly instead of using their default query language (SLQ).

jasongill2• 2 years ago

wow, I missed that in the docs but this is exactly what I was thinking!

beembeem• 2 years ago

let me introduce you to this hot, open source, nosql database that's webscale...

snthpy4• 2 years ago

This question has come up a few times in this thread. However I don't see how people expect this to be possible unless they are talking about ndjson with flat records. JSON in general is a very nested format so languages based on relational algebra/calculus like SQL and PRQL are not going to be that useful unless the data is flattened and normalised first.

mynameyeff• 2 years ago

Wow, very cool. I was looking for something like this

mrbluecoat• 2 years ago

TSV support might be nice for Zeek logs

franchb• 2 years ago

Maybe integrate with https://github.com/brimdata/zed ?

lionkor• 2 years ago

For anyone else wondering; it's written in Go, and it keeps state inside its config file, for example sources (like a db connection string).

Summerbud• 2 years ago

To be honest, JQ is handy but it's so hard to maintain. I found myself not able to fully read other's JQ related script

tmountain• 2 years ago

Even without a JSON column in Postgres, this is pretty trivial: SELECT jsonb_pretty(to_jsonb(employees)) FROM employees;

rurban• 2 years ago

Better would be the reverse. SQL queries over json: octosql.

dartos• 2 years ago

Wow what an expensive domain name.

dewey2• 2 years ago

Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be more efficient for people to just learn SQL instead of trying to build tools or layers on top of it that introduce more complexities and are harder to search for.

remon• 2 years ago

HN is inundated with posts announcing paper thin abstractions on top of existing technology or utilities that just move the goalpost of what you knowledge you need to be effective. It's a weird trend that seems almost entirely motivated by people wanting open source projects in their resume, or seek funding if its a startup.

dlisboa• 2 years ago

It's a weird trend that seems almost entirely motivated by people wanting open source projects in their resume

That’s really harsh and misguided. If people didn’t do “paper thin abstractions” projects on their own time for the simple pleasure of doing it we wouldn’t have 90% of the successful projects we have today.

Let people have fun and don’t judge their motives when they’re making something Open Source. I can guarantee the person just thought “this would be cool to have” and implemented it.

neilotoole9• 2 years ago

It's a weird trend that seems almost entirely motivated by people wanting open source projects in their resume

Developer here. I can't speak to what you see as the weird trend, but I can speak about sq's history:

- I created the first version of sq circa 2013 as my own personal dev tool to address some pain points (amongst other things: getting JSON out of various DBs from the command line in a consistent manner, and wanting an easy way to inspect DB schemas, i.e. "sq inspect")

- It was starting to be a minor PITA dealing with colleagues asking for the latest revision of the tool, so I open-sourced it. In 2016 or so I think?

- sq is FL/OSS and will remain so, no funding is sought, not even one of those "buy me a coffee" thingies

- I didn't create this HN post about sq, nor do I know the person who did. But thanks for sq's 15 mins of fame, kind stranger

raydev2• 2 years ago

Thankfully that doesn't apply to this post. sq is a great, full-featured tool.

WhitneyLand• 2 years ago

What a cynical take. Most people working on side projects do so because they find them interesting or useful rather than to just score resume points.

They’re not moving anyone’s goalposts all usage is voluntary.

The fact that HN is mentioned is also confusing. If something had no value beyond paper thin abstraction I doubt we’d be seeing it on the front page with 500 votes.

Even if this project turned out to be less than hoped it seems counterproductive to complain about people creating and exploring. It’s a good thing to see and natural selection will do any sorting needed.

mschuster913• 2 years ago

SQL interop is where the pain is at. Using standard tooling of most database systems, best you can get is CSV with all the pains this shithole of a data transfer format brings.

itohihiyt• 2 years ago

What's wrong with CSV? I love me a CSV file.

seanhunter3• 2 years ago

That doesn't match my experience at all. Every database I'm aware of has multiple options for data export and import for batch and command processing in the standard tooling. CSV is almost never "the best you can get". What is going to be best depends on your use case, and indeed at a bare minimum you can almost always change the field and line seperators and get something that works just fine on the commandline and avoids most of the stuff people find hard about CSV.

Additionally, if people like jq, they don't need a special tool like this. They can just get the database to output json and use json/jq - another tool isn't needed. In postgres you can do something like this

   select array_to_json(array_agg(row_to_json (r))) from (
      ... put your sql query here...
   ) r;

...and postgres will output a json array for you where each item in the array is a json map of a single row of the output.

I'm sure other databases have similar functionality.

zmmmmm2• 2 years ago

I think it'd be a moot point if SQL wasn't painful and awkward to work with in the first place. But database purists control it and won't let go, so we will have to live with everyone else inventing layers to make their lives easier.

dewey2• 2 years ago

For me this feels like the complaints about error handling in Go. People who work with it all the time, don't even think about it past the first week. If you are starting out it might bother people because they are not used to it.

Personally I really like working with SQL and find it quite elegant, I always encourage people to use it as it really is a job-superpower if you can just dig up issues directly in the DB quickly. It has a long history so for every question you have there's many answers or avenues to ask them.

consteval• 2 years ago

I truly have never understood this mentality. To me, SQL is very convenient and quick to work with. It's extraordinarily painless.

I've done data processing in Perl and Python before. THAT is painful. What I think people don't realize is that doing procedural "querying" in a typical PL is, like, 10x the amount of code as an equivalent SQL query. I don't see how the alternative is much better.

SQL just doesn't work like a typical PL, but that's a good thing.

Xenoamorphous• 2 years ago

It's funny because recently a "full stack" dev who's in reality 95% frontend was telling me he's not a fan of Tailwind and that he'd rather learn "proper" CSS.

And the irony is of course, he never wants to use a relational DB to avoid SQL, so No-SQL DB it is.

nikolamus• 2 years ago

Wat

freedomben• 2 years ago

I've unfortunately met a number of "full stack" devs recently that are clearly 95% frontend as well, and have a very similar attitude as that person toward backend tech in general. We of course should not take such a small sample size and draw any sort of conclusions, but it's definitely a trend I'm looking out for now whenever someone claims to be "full stack." If the only backend stuff you've done is Firebase, or just a handful of serverless functions that don't do much, or if the "backend" you have in mind is just SSR-ing templates into HTML, then you really should qualify any claims about backend.

One recently after

fforflo2• 2 years ago

Paraphrasing Spencer:

Those who don't understand SQL are doomed to reinvent it, poorly

EGreg3• 2 years ago

Actually, when it comes to SQL specifically, it almost demands using a language one higher up.

Any language that features the ability to embed/interpolate unescaped quotes is not secure enough to be used directly by professional developers. Just not worth it to track down all the potential injection attacks.

And if an abstraction lets you understand the structure of queries (eg for sharding them) and even writes the code for you and balances parentheses, flags other syntax errors at compile time etc. then it’s a net benefit.

And of course there is the Adapter Pattern to abstract away connection logic and differences between mysql, pg, etc.

I wrote the “Db” library 12 years ago in PHP and still use it.

I never released it on HN for reasons like this. But I might. Here it is, embedded in my larger library, but I might break it out:

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/tree/main/platform/classes/...

Documentation:

https://qbix.com/platform/guide/database

https://qbix.com/platform/guide/models

One of the coolest features:

https://qbix.com/platform/guide/models#relations

If you read the above, please let me know your feedback!

Question: Should I release it as a Show HN?

simplify• 2 years ago

SQL itself is a reinvention of Prolog, poorly. Its core value is that we're stuck with it.

krosaen• 2 years ago

I know sql pretty well and still find value in this kind of tool - creating schemas and inserting data is a clunky part of sql - the query language is where it really shines. So I can imagine using this to quickly insert some data or to get familiar with the schema and then dive in with normal sql queries.

mattbrewsbytes2• 2 years ago

The sq and jq tools are both neat command line gimmicks but in my workflow their usefulness is very short. I can't imagine using sq on a query involving a handful of tables and some inner/outer joins. How would I know its outputting the correct SQL? If you mess up joins you end up with bad output.

Here's my theory: some developers see simple languages that are easy to learn and want to build something more complex to output that language. Maybe its a sub-conscious thing.

HTML is another one, if explained simply, HTML and CSS basic use cases should be easy-ish to pick up by nearly anyone. The fact that we have so many over-engineered frameworks and libraries out there that generate these is evidence of over complicating simple things. Maybe its called resume driven development? Maybe people see genuine useful frameworks that get wide adoption and are wannabes?

neilotoole9• 2 years ago

How would I know its outputting the correct SQL? If you mess up joins you end up with bad output.

The generated SQL is output in sq's logs, when logging is enabled.

https://sq.io/docs/config#logging

8338550bff96• 2 years ago

Lots of people struggle to understand the declarative programming language paradigm. It is really pesky because since you're declaring what kinds of results you expect rather than dictating what must be done, you're forced to define your boundary conditions up-front. Much more fun and exciting to charge ahead without worrying about such things

goosejuice• 2 years ago

There are a several features here that go beyond 'learn SQL'. I don't see how you could jump to this conclusion if you read the docs.

Why does pgcli exist. What about dbeaver, datagrip, pgadmin, postico, LINQ, ORMs? It's almost as if people value different interfaces to databases.

Maybe it's not for you, but it's not hard to imagine that someone, beyond the author, might find it useful. Maybe it's just me but to dismiss those people as individuals that should just 'learn SQL' is a pretty rude thing to say.

_hyn32• 2 years ago

I tend to agree! but this seems to have a subtly different use case. It's actually very cool. I can see this being a good addition to my toolbox.

rvalue• 2 years ago

Sometimes I wonder why these SQL standards cost so much to burn a hole in a millionaire's pocket.

quotemstr• 2 years ago

Yeah. Alternatives to long-established and useful technologies have to meet a high bar before their option pays for their disruption.

Things that seem potentially worth it to me:

* seL4

* Google's SQL syntax tweak

* Rust

* GraalVM

* systemd

* Tree sitter

* LSP

* CMake

* Bazel

These all get you a step change improvement in comprehensibility, safety, or something else important.

Things that seem like more churn than they're worth:

* Noise protocol (relative to TLS)

* JMAP (compared to good old IMAP)

* Nim/Zig/etc.

* Wayland (fait accompli now, but still)

* Varlink

* Fish shell

* YAML/TOML

* Sq?

* Meson

I wish we, as an industry, invested more in improving existing technologies instead of continually abandoning and replacing working solutions.

jeltz3• 2 years ago

While I agree with your general idea my lists are quite different.

I would move Zig (innovates a lot in language and compiler design) and JMAP (IMAP is horrible and needs to be replaced) up and CMake and Bazel down (I count them the same as Meson). I would say the jury is still out on Google's tweak and on seL4.

raydev2• 2 years ago

Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be more efficient for people to just learn assembly instead of trying to build tools or layers on top of it that introduce more complexities and are harder to search for.

pratio• 2 years ago

Though I respect and applaud the effort that went into creating this and successfully releasing it, It has fewer features than duckdb supports at the moment.

Duckdb supports both Postgres, Mysql, SQLite and many other extensions.

Postgres: https://duckdb.org/docs/extensions/postgres

MySQL: https://duckdb.org/docs/extensions/mysql

SQLite: https://duckdb.org/docs/extensions/sqlite

You can try this yourself.

1. Clone this repo and create a postgres container with sample data: https://github.com/TemaDobryyR/simple-postgres-container

2. Install duckdb if you haven't and if you have just access it on the console: https://duckdb.org/docs/installation/index?version=stable&en...

3. Load the postgres extension: INSTALL postgres;LOAD postgres;

4. Connect to the postgres database: ATTACH 'dbname=postgres user=postgres host=127.0.0.1 password=postgres' AS db (TYPE POSTGRES, READ_ONLY);

5. SHOW ALL TABLES;

6. select * from db.public.transactions limit 10;

Trying to access SQL data without using SQL only gets you so far and you can just use basic sql interface for that.

mritchie712• 2 years ago

not to mention the dozen+ other sources DuckDB supports (Iceberg, Parquet, CSV, Delata, JSON, etc.).

DuckDB extension support / dev experience is quite good now too. I've been working on some improvements (e.g. predicate pushdown) to the Iceberg extension and it's been pretty smooth.

_hyn32• 2 years ago

Duckdb is different, though. Not having tried SQ but it seems like a better tool for quick declarative data-munges/parsing/etc, while Duckdb is more of a real project tool with real SQL.

https://duckdb.org/docs/api/cli/

lightningspirit• 2 years ago

Although jq query style is not absolutely pleasant I see many examples where this tool can be used such as data transformation, import/export and linux pipelines that need access to databases.

gampleman• 2 years ago

It still seems to me a better solution to these sorts of problems is to use a better shell like nushell, that has richer datatypes, and so you can use the same tool to manipulate files, processes, json, csv, databases and more.

nashashmi• 2 years ago

sq is pronounced like seek. Its query language, SLQ, is pronounced like sleek

As a person who is apart from the tech scene, and lurks in the tech space out of interest, I appreciate this guidance. For the longest time I didn’t know nginx was pronounced Engine-X; I called it N-jinx.

wvh• 2 years ago

Don't sweat it. It's a running joke amongst guitar players no two people pronounce D'Addario the same way, not to mention the tremolo bar which technically should be called a vibrato bar. I surmise any scene has its trip-up words.

deskr• 2 years ago

D'Addario is of course pronounced "Dadda Rio", with emphasis on Rio and a slight Italian accent.

neilotoole9• 2 years ago

The theory at the time was that if "SQL" is pronounced like "sequel", and "sq" is just dropping the "L" from "SQL", then "sq" must be...

I suspect the uptake on the "seek" pronunciation is about 2%, if I'm being generous

Gbox4• 2 years ago

If "sq" is pronounced "seek", then is "jq" pronounced "jeek"?

lnxg33k1• 2 years ago

It is great, I installed it, only thing I'd suggest, probably minor, is to also extract the commands to install from the bash script, and put them in the `Install` section directly, I don't run .sh script, especially if they need privileges, so I went through the bash script to take the commands for debian, they're there, probably could also be outside for other kind of people

neilotoole9• 2 years ago

You can already install sq using several of the common package managers, or build from (Go) source if you prefer.

https://sq.io/docs/install

novoreorx• 2 years ago

I really like the idea of https://github.com/dinedal/textql, which uses SQL to interact with file-based data stores. However, I don't understand why sq does the opposite—using a new DSL to access a database that already has a widely-adopted and easy-to-use language: good old SQL.

peter_d_sherman• 2 years ago

First there was shell scripting, then grep, then sed, then awk, later Perl... well, now there's 'sq'!

Looks like an absolutely great (and necessary!) utility, which will automate many future workflows and dataflows, save countless hours of time collectively for many people en masse, and therefore change the world (allow more people to get more done in less time!) much like Unix, shell scripting, grep, sed, awk and Perl gave the world...

Congratulations on writing what no doubt will become one of the major Unix/Windows/MacOS/Other OS/Linux shell scripting commands in the future, if it isn't already!

Well done!

Sq.io: jq for databases and more

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